Synopsis

A lush, illustrated cookbook devoted to preparing and cooking ducks and geese, both domestic and wild, from the author of the award-winning blog Hunter Angler Gardener Cook.Duck is having a renaissance in American restaurants and kitchens as cooks discover that diverse breeds, species, and cuts of meat offer an exciting range of flavors and textures. Many cooks—and even hunters—have a fear of cooking fowl. Duck, Duck, Goose shows you how to cook duck and goose like a pro: perfectly crisp skin crackling with each bite, succulent confit, impeccable prosciutto, and more.

Hank Shaw, an award-winning food writer, hunter, and cook on the forefront of the marsh-to-table revolution, provides all you need to know about obtaining, cleaning, and cooking these flavorful birds. Duck, Duck, Goose includes detailed guides on species and breeds, selecting a duck in the market, and plucking and hanging a wild bird. Shaw’s delicious and doable recipes include basics such as Grilled Duck Breast and Slow-Roasted Duck; international favorites like Duck Pho, Sichuan Fragrant Duck, Mexican Duck with Green Mole, and Cassoulet; and celebration-worthy fare such as Perfect Roast Goose. It also features an array of duck and goose confit and charcuterie, from fresh sausages to dry-cured salami.

The most comprehensive guide to preparing and cooking both domestic and wild ducks and geese, Duck, Duck, Goose will be a treasured companion for anyone who wants to free themselves from the tyranny of chicken and enjoy perfectly cooked waterfowl.

Excerpt

INTRODUCTION

Cooking a duck or a goose in today’s world is an act of expression. It is a way to find that forgotten feast we Americans once enjoyed, to free ourselves from the Tyranny of the Chicken and shake our fists at the notion that fat is our enemy. Mastering these birds will make you a more competent carnivore. It will help you regain the skills we once had in our kitchens, and it will give you the knowledge needed to tackle more challenging morsels, such as giblets and wings and rendered fat. Cooking a duck or goose—a whole bird, from bill to feet—is real cooking. True, honest cooking.

Like pork, these birds offer an array of flavors and textures depending on which cut you choose. But unlike almost every other animal we normally consider food, ducks and geese offer a diversity of breeds and species that even a novice can detect at the table. The flavor of a Pekin duck is as far from that of a goose as a skinless chicken breast is from a rib eye. And that is just a domestic example. Throw in the world of wild ducks and geese and your experiences multiply tenfold: a roasted green-winged teal bears little resemblance to an eider, a goose, or even a cinnamon teal. The common mallard can taste markedly different depending on whether it had been eating corn, acorns, rice, or fish.

Waterfowl has a rich human history, as well. Tamed first by the ancient Egyptians, geese are one of humankind’s oldest domesticated animals. Ducks, which arrived in the barnyard later, have nevertheless been domesticated for thousands of years and arose independently in two parts of the world before they spread to the rest of the globe. Cultures as far-flung as Mexico, Persia, and China have been cooking ducks and geese for more than three millennia, and nearly every cuisine in the world has found a place for duck at the table.

Perfectly cooked duck breast has the meatiness of a steak with an additional cloak of fatty, crispy skin. In fact, it is better to associate duck with beef than with other poultry: think of the breast meat as a steak and the rest of the bird as the brisket. But it is the skin that most distinguishes duck in the kitchen. Crispy duck skin is one of the greatest pleasures of the dining table. It is the reason that Peking duck has persisted as a Chinese classic for nearly seven hundred years. And crispy skin is what separates confit, a French method of lightly curing duck legs or wings and then slowly cooking them in their own fat, from any another piece of braised meat. Confit is so meaty, silky, and crispy that it has become many a chef’s “death bed” meal.

I am not alone in feeling this passionate about waterfowl. Duck is experiencing a renaissance in restaurant kitchens across the continent. Seared duck breast or duck confit has become a common sight on menus. And just as with the pork revolution of the past decade, diners well outside of the nation’s culinary capitals of San Francisco, New York, and Chicago are finding evidence of the trend: crispy duck tongues in Kansas City; duck skin cracklins in Toronto; duck consommé in Minneapolis; foie gras foam in Sacramento; duck legs, braised and pulled like carnitas, tucked into tacos in Austin. Diners are excited about duck. It has become the new pork.

But this renaissance need not be the province of the professionals. Restaurant cooks are not wizards. With the possible exception of Peking duck, they are not cooking duck in mystical ways that require years of apprenticeship to master. Cooking a duck properly is not rocket science, though it does require some specialized knowledge. This book’s primary goal is to give you that knowledge.

I can hear some of you. You’re thinking about the ducks you’ve eaten in the past, and the image you’ve conjured up is not good. Chances are the first word that popped into your head was some variant of greasy, dry, or livery. And I am certain that either you or someone you know has his or her Great Goose Disaster story. These tales of woe typically begin with visions of a Victorian Christmas and end with gallons of grease—often igniting into fireballs—dry, unhappy meat, and a lifetime of disappointment. “Oh, I tried goose once. Let me tell you about the time . . .” Even hunters who often shoot scores of ducks in a season share this fear of fowl and banish their ducks to the sausage heap.

This need not be so. With a few exceptions, the recipes in this book can be done with no special equipment from ingredients you can buy in an average supermarket. Yes, I have included a few high-wire recipes, but that is just to show you the range of dishes you can create with these remarkable animals.

In the pages that follow, you will learn how to break down a duck or goose into legs, breasts, and wings, a process not terribly different from how you handle a chicken. The hunters among you will find out how to hang, pluck, and eviscerate their birds. Throughout this book, you will discover the fundamentals of duck and goose cookery: how to cook a duck breast properly, and how to cook duck legs so that they are tender, yet still have crispy skin. I will walk you through the culinary jazz of making sausages and other charcuterie and stocks, teach you how to render duck and goose fat from both domestic and wild birds, and describe how to cook with that fat as well as with duck eggs, which may look like chicken eggs but are not.

Once you learn my method for braising duck legs, you can use it to cook not only my other braised waterfowl recipes but also to perfect your own creations. Master the task of searing a duck breast medium-rare with crispy skin and you will never be far from a memorable meal: even paired with a store-bought sauce and tater tots, a perfectly cooked duck breast never fails to impress. And after you make a few batches of sausage using my techniques, you will find yourself making links in your own personal style. Charcuterie is an addictive culinary art.

Of special importance to me is the section on giblets. Properly cooked, giblets can taste every bit as wondrous as the rest of the duck. But there is the rub: for many, “properly cooked” is an impossibility. The recipes in this book will disabuse you of that idea, and they will help you make full use of a duck’s so-called fifth quarter, even if is only in gravy, sausage, or a homemade “duck burger.”

But before you can cook, you must first catch your duck, be it in the market or the marsh. Thankfully, this is no longer the ordeal it once was. Ten years ago, you would be lucky to find a frozen whole duck in your supermarket. Now those same markets are starting to sell breasts and legs separately and stock fresh whole ducks at the meat counter. Farmers’ markets are increasingly offering carefully raised heritage breeds, and duck eggs are no longer a rare item. What’s more, if you have an Asian market near you, you will never want for duck: Asians eat the majority of all ducks raised worldwide, and for many Chinese and Southeast Asians, duck is more common than chicken.

It is my hope that if you glean nothing else from this book, you will come away with a heaping slice of confidence in the kitchen. Waterfowl are endlessly fascinating, endlessly diverse in their forms and flavors. Get yourself some duck breasts, with a nice layer of fat and skin. Sear them in a pan until the skin crisps like a cracker and the meat is as lovely as a medium-rare rib eye. Flavor it with nothing more than sea salt, pepper, and perhaps a squeeze of lemon. Taste it. Savor it. You will see. A perfect duck breast is a revelation, a life-changing event. There will be no turning back. Ready to begin?

This is an easier way to roast a duck that does not involve cutting off the breast midstream. It is a European method that results in a thoroughly cooked bird with no pink breast meat. You start the duck in a low oven and finish on high to crisp the skin. This method works with domesticated ducks and very fatty wild ones.

Preheat the oven to 300°F. To ensure crisp skin, pierce the skin all over with a clean needle or the tip of a sharp knife, positioning the tool at an angle so that you are piercing just the skin and not the meat. Another option that works very well comes from chef Eddy Leroux of Restaurant Daniel in New York City: score the skin of the whole duck with a sharp knife in the same sort of crosshatch pattern you would use if you were cooking just the breast. Leroux’s method looks odd but results in a crispier skin. Whichever you choose, opening up the skin helps render the fat underneath, making it crispier.

Rub the duck all over with the cut sides of the lemon. Use both halves to coat it thoroughly. Put the spent halves inside the cavity. Liberally salt the bird; use a little more salt than you think you need. Stuff the cavity with the herbs. Put the duck in a cast-iron frying pan or other heavy, ovenproof pan and roast for 45 minutes. If you are roasting small wild ducks (wigeon, teal, wood duck, or the like), roast for 30 minutes. Check the fat accumulating in the pan and pour some off as you go. Save this fat to cook with later.

Remove the pan from the oven and turn the heat up to 500°F. When it reaches this temperature, roast for 5 to 15 minutes longer. Small birds such as teal or wigeon will need only 5 minutes, and large birds such as Muscovy or Rouen will need the full 15 minutes; a mallard will need 10 minutes.

Remove from the oven and let the bird rest before carving or serving. You’ll only need 5 minutes resting time for small birds, 10 minutes for other ducks. Carve as directed on page 32.

A Word on Salt All salts are not alike. For this book, I use Morton’s kosher salt, the kind that comes in the big blue box. The other common household brand, Diamond Crystal, is ground finer than Morton’s. This means that if you are a Diamond Crystal user, you will need less salt than what I call for in my recipes. This is why in my salami, baking, and curing recipes, I also provide salt (and curing salt) measures by weight in addition to volume.

I prefer to use bulk sea salt in my kitchen—I make my own from the Pacific Ocean—and I also use a variety of finishing salts, such as French fleur de sel, sel gris, flaked salt, and smoked salt. The best place to get your hands on quality salts is The Meadow, which has shops in Portland, Oregon, and in New York City. They sell online at www.atthemeadow.com.

Table of Contents

Basics From Market to Table: Breeds, Buying, Breaking Down, and Storing From Marsh to Table: Wild Species, Field Care, Hanging, and Processing Cooking with Duck: Flavors and Wine and Beer Pairings

Whole Birds

Pieces Breasts Legs and Wings

Extras Giblets Charcuterie Duck Fat Duck Eggs

Stock, glace, and consomme

Selected Bibliography Acknowledgments index

Hank Shaw

About Hank Shaw

HANK SHAW is the author of the book Hunt, Gather, Cook and the blog Hunter Angler Gardener Cook, which won the James Beard Award for Best Blog in 2013 and the IACP Best Food Blog award in both 2010 and 2011. Shaw has been featured on the Travel Channel’s Bizarre Foods and his work has appeared in Food & Wine, Organic Gardening, Field & Stream, and the Art of Eating, as well as hunting and conservation magazines such as Delta Waterfowl, California Waterfowl Magazine, and Pheasants Forever. He lives in the Sacramento, California area. Learn more at www.honest-food.net.

Praise

Praise

“A Best Cookbook of 2013”—Sunset

“Hank Shaw elevates waterfowl to its rightful place in the culinary skies. He will teach you how to turn flesh into edible works of art without sacrificing practicality. I’ll be reading—and using—this book for decades to come.”—Steven Rinella, author of American Buffalo and Meat Eater

“You don’t have to be a hunter to want to cook duck and goose. Thankfully, Hank Shaw has demystified these birds for all to enjoy!”—Chris Cosentino, chef-owner of Incanto and winner of Top Chef Masters

“Throughout history in Europe, Asia, and the Americas, the tasty, sustainable, and versatile duck has satisfied many happy diners. Whether you want to know the difference in taste between certain species or even how to make a duck hot dog, Hank’s book is a perfectly thorough guide on everything you need to know about preparing duck.” —Daniel Boulud, chef, restaurateur, and author of Braise

“Hank Shaw has produced a kind of ‘ultimate cookbook,’ which I found utterly fascinating. Here is everything you will ever need to know about ducks and geese, how to hunt them in the supermarket or in the marsh, and how to cook them.” —Paula Wolfert, author of The Cooking of Southwest France and Mediterranean Cooking

“In my universe there is no bigger star than Hank Shaw. Passionate and learned, his writing provides the inspiration for those who don’t live the outdoors lifestyle to be in the field and on the water. His recipes teach even the most expert cook how to use the right techniques for handling waterfowl in the kitchen and his wit and wisdom make Duck, Duck, Goose a superb read. With Holly Heyser’s beautiful and practical imagery, this book delivers on its promise to make us all more competent cooks.” —Andrew Zimmern, host of Bizarre Foods and Andrew Zimmern’s Bizarre World

“I grew up among avid duck hunters and have enjoyed many meals of teal, mallards, and other wild ducks, and as a chef I’ve worked with every kind of domesticated duck. It’s no secret that duck is one of my favorite things to cook. I love that this book exists! I hope it will inspire many more cooks to explore the wonderful flavor of wild and domesticated ducks.” —Traci des Jardins, James Beard Award-winning chef and owner of Jardinière

If your acquaintance with water fowl is limited to Peking duck and Christmas goose, then, welcome, because you're holding an invitation to a remarkable world of cooking. Hank Shaw's recipes, along with his inimitable prose, lure you into the kitchen, encouraging you to cook everything from whole birds to giblets; dishes smoked and drunken; Chinese, French, Laotian, and German; crispy and braised. Shaw's passion is so infectious, his knowledge so commanding, Duck, Duck, Goose is more than a cookbook. It's a culinary field guide to dishes delightfully exotic to comfortingly familiar.—David Leite, author of The New Portuguese Table and publisher of Leite's Culinaria (LCcooks.com)